from the oops dept

Copyright trolls operate on a precarious edge.They have to find enough people willing to fall for their threat settlement letters to be profitable, while at the same time not causing enough of a stir to be noticed by the general public or risk backlash. Quite often, copyright trolls do indeed cross this line. It's not all that often, however, that they cross it in spectacular fashion.

Yet that appears to be exactly what they've done in Finland, where so many internet account holders have been sent threat letters that both local law enforcement groups and the national government have been forced to respond.

HS estimates that as many as 60,000 people could be in line to receive cash demands similar to the one detailed above. They come from Hedman Partners, the Helsinki law firm that’s been involved in copyright trolling cases in Finland for the past couple of years. Based on a 2,200 euro settlement, the cash involved is potentially enormous. For every hundred cases settled, the law firm reportedly pockets 130,000 euros for “monitoring costs”, with 90,000 euros going to the rightsholders.

Due to the scale of the problem, complaints from letter recipients are now being reported to various local authorities. After receiving dozens of complaints from bewildered Internet account holders, police were forced to issue a statement last Friday.

That statement from the police essentially amounted to stating that there was no criminal aspect to any of this, that it was instead a civil matter, and could the public please stop inundating them with calls about it, please? It's not surprising that the police were called, however, as these types of threat letters are typically constructed in a manner that might lead the reader to assume there are criminal penalties that could be levied against them. It also seems that many of the bewildered account holders had contacted the police to make a claim of fraud against the copyright troll, a claim the police decided not to pursue.

But the Finnish government might, it seems.

With the police backing away from any involvement, expectations have now fallen on the government to tackle the problem. Thankfully for those involved, the Ministry of Education and Culture appears to be taking the matter seriously and has promised an investigation.

“It is not intended that our legislation should be used for milking [the public],” said ‎Government Counsellor Anna Vuopala. “It seems that it is appropriate for the Ministry to convene the parties involved in order to find out whether the law is being complied with in all respects,” she said.

This is probably the worst case scenario for a copyright troll: creating enough of a fervor with the public to warrant a look-see from the public officials beholden to that public for votes. Specifically, the government is going to examine whether Finnish ISPs are following the law that requires them to hand over account holder information if piracy occurs on an account to a "significant degree." It seems that some of the settlement letters are going to account holders that have, at most, engaged in something of a one-off case of filesharing. Whatever the definition of the laughably vague term "significant degree" might be, it certainly seems obvious that such a degree can't be a single instance.

A crackdown on copyright trolling may now be on the menu, all because the trolls overplayed their hand.

from the money-for-nothing dept

Back in 2015, a Techdirt Podcast explored the fascinating idea of a universal basic income guarantee, something that the Swiss considered, but ultimately rejected in a referendum. The idea of giving money to everyone, regardless of what they do, or how much they earn, is intriguing and attractive for many. But what effect would it have on how people live and work? That's what Finland hopes to find out from an experiment it is conducting in this field, as a story in the Guardian reports:

Finland has become the first country in Europe to pay its unemployed citizens an unconditional monthly sum, in a social experiment that will be watched around the world amid gathering interest in the idea of a universal basic income.

Under the two-year, nationwide pilot scheme, which began on 1 January, 2,000 unemployed Finns aged 25 to 58 will receive a guaranteed sum of €560 (£475).

As that indicates, this isn't a universal basic wage, since it's aimed at just a few of those receiving unemployment benefit, and the money will replace existing financial support. On the other hand, it isn't just some kind of creative accounting, because they will continue to receive the monthly sum even if they find work. There are already plans to roll it out more widely.

As the Guardian notes, other parts of the world, including Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Scotland, are also looking to try out the idea. At a time when there are fears that automation may well reduce the total number of workers needed in industry, it's great to see these experiments exploring an approach that could help to alleviate social problems arising from this shift.

from the disinformation-nation dept

We've noted numerous times now that a cornerstone of the Putin regime has been the use of internet trolls to flood the internet with propaganda. These armies of paid sockpuppets get paid 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000) a month to create proxied, viable fake personas -- specifically tasked with pumping the internet full of toxic disinformation 24 hours a day. The practice was recently exposed by journalist, activist and mother Lyuda Savchuk, who spent three months employed as such a troll -- before successfully suing the Russian government for a single ruble on principle.

Criticize this practice as a writer anywhere on the internet and you'll pretty quickly find yourself the target of anonymous attacks in the comment section -- or significantly worse. Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro recently found this out the hard way after profiling Putin's online propaganda efforts in a series of reports for Finland's state broadcaster Yle Kioski. Since the reports, Aro has found herself under attack by an ocean of internet pugilists that have filled the internet with claims Aro is everything from a professional drug dealer to a paid NATO stooge:

"In response to her reporting, pro-Russian activists in Helsinki organized a protest outside the headquarters of Yle, accusing it of being a troll factory itself. Only a handful of people showed up. At the same time, Ms. Aro has been peppered with abusive emails, vilified as a drug dealer on social media sites and mocked as a delusional bimbo in a music video posted on YouTube. “There are so many layers of fakery you get lost,” said Ms. Aro, who was awarded the Finnish Grand Prize for Journalism in March.

...She (also) received a call late at night on her cellphone from a number in Ukraine. Nobody spoke, and all she could hear was gunfire. This was followed by text and email messages denouncing her as a “NATO whore” and a message purporting to come from her father — who died 20 years ago — saying he was “watching her.”

Finland is an EU member but has contemplated joining NATO -- talks about which accelerated after Russia's not-so-subtle invasion of the Ukraine. Russia, in turn, has started leaning heavily on its online disinformation puppets to try and turn public sentiment against such a move. Part of the effectiveness of Putin's paid trolls is that it's impossible to differentiate them from the usual wash of vitriol and idiocy that coats online interactions on any given day. As such, it's not entirely unlike trying to have a fist fight with a running stream, reflected in the Finnish media's confusion on how to tackle the problem outside of things like "open letters":

"The false claim that Ms. Aro was a drug dealer triggered an unusual open letter signed by more than 20 Finnish editors infuriated by what they denounced as the “poisoning of public debate” with “insults, defamation and outright lies.” The Finnish police began an investigation into the website for harassment and hate speech.

“I don’t know if these people are acting on orders from Russia, but they are clearly what Lenin called ‘useful idiots,’” said Mika Pettersson, the editor of Finland’s national news agency and an organizer of the editors’ open letter. “They are playing into Putin’s pocket. Nationalist movements in Finland and other European countries want to destabilize the European Union and NATO, and this goes straight into Putin’s narrative.”

The European Union doesn't appear to be particularly prepared for this new world of online information warfare either, and has embraced arguably outdated concepts like "the truth" or by cataloging the most egregious claims in a weekly report dubbed the "Disinformation Review." And while disinformation and propaganda is certainly nothing new (especially here in the west), it's clear that Putin has taken online information warfare to an entirely new level. One the international community isn't quite ready for -- and is certain to respond to with no limit of bad ideas and even worse laws over time.

Full disclosure before you read about it in the comment section: I'm a former opium salesman paid by the CIA to unfairly malign absolutely everybody.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

A Singaporean math test question went viral not too long ago, confusing some people and making others wonder how American kids should be taught math. Plenty of other countries perform better on international standardized tests than US kids do, but it doesn't always mean the US should adopt other countries' lesson plans and policies. However, there's always some political pressure to try to change things (not always for the better). Check out some links on Finland and how it has been working to improve its school system since the 1960s.

from the but-not-dead-yet dept

As we've noted before, copyright levies -- effectively a tax on blank storage media -- are becoming ever-more anachronistic and unworkable. So it's good to hear about a country doing the sensible thing and getting rid of them entirely (pdf):

Finland is the latest EU member state to scrap levies on digital devices, following similar moves in Spain and the UK. The Finnish Parliament on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to replace a levies system that has existed since 1984 with the creation of a government fund designed to compensate artists for private copying of content such as music and movies.

That's from a press release issued by the lobby group Digital Europe, which describes itself as follows:

Digital Europe represents the digital technology industry in Europe. Our members include some of the world's largest IT, telecoms and consumer electronics companies and national associations from every part of Europe. Digital Europe wants European businesses and citizens to benefit fully from digital technologies and for Europe to grow, attract and sustain the world's best digital technology companies.

Given its background, it's hardly surprising that Digital Europe hopes that Finland's decision is part of a wider move:

Pressure for EU reform is now greater than ever. The UK earlier this year passed a law that legalized private copying by individuals without any requirement for additional compensation to artists. Two years ago Spain replaced levies with a government compensation fund similar to the one adopted in Finland this week.

Although it's true that progress has been made, it's also worth noting that the usual copyright dinosaurs are fighting back, and that the final outcome is by no means clear. In the UK, the music industry has said that it may try to challenge the private copying exception in the courts. In Spain, legal action by collecting societies has resulted in two key questions about copyright levies being sent to the European Union Court of Justice, and its judgment on the case is likely to have important implications for such levies throughout the EU.

from the democracy,-who-needs-it? dept

Techdirt has been following the fascinating experiment of allowing the public to crowdsource proposals for new laws in Finland. As we reported, the Citizen's Initiative Act requires the Finnish Parliament to process any bill that collects 50,000 signatures from citizens of voting age. Last year, a bill to make copyright more balanced and better suited to the digital age managed to gather the requisite number of signatures, offering hope that it would be presented to the Finnish Parliament for a vote. But as TorrentFreak explained more recently, the Finnish Parliament's Education and Culture Committee recommended that the "Common Sense For Copyright" bill should be rejected. TorrentFreak quotes the digital rights group EDRi's explanation of what happened:

"In its report, the Committee notes that the initiative suggests several ambitious amendments, but that it considers it impossible to propose, based on the initiative, even partial changes to the existing copyright law," EDRi notes.

"The report states that the initiative includes internal contradictions and that many of the amendments it suggests are too significantly incompatible with the current legislation."

That's rather telling, because the measures in "Common Sense For Copyright" are hardly radical:

The draft, the brainchild of the Open Ministry nonprofit, calls for reduced penalties for copyright infringement and current penalties to be applied only in cases of a commercial scale. Fair Use provisions would also be expanded, alongside exemptions for those wishing to backup purchased media and time-shift commercial content.

The fact that the Parliamentary committee thought that even these mild measures were "too significantly incompatible with the current legislation" underlines just how great the gulf is between actual copyright law and what many people feel would be fair. Sadly, a report on the Finnish public broadcasting company YLE's website confirms that not only did the Finnish Parliament refuse to consider the bill, it has dismissed out of hand every crowdsourced bill that reached the 50,000 threshold:

Each of the six citizen's initiatives that have proceeded through the proper channels to reach the parliamentary floor for discussion has failed. The Finnish Parliament says it doesn't have the time to hear them and they can’t be moved to another date. Activists say technical shortcomings are poor justification for the slowness of the process.

That's a truly disappointing end to a story that began on a hopeful note. When politicians won't even allow the public these tiny expressions of democracy -- just as the European Commission refused to allow a purely symbolic online petition against TAFTA/TTIP to go ahead -- is it any wonder that people feel disenfranchised and disenchanted with politics these days, or that they are starting to take to the streets as a result?

from the brainwork dept

As we all know, video games have traditionally been for confusing news organizations, committing virtual war-crimes, and turning the otherwise sweet, virtuous children of the western world into gun-toting real-life Duke Nukems with no regard for human life or decency. Also, turn that damn techno music down. Anyway, much to my surprise, it turns out the past time my parents were constantly telling me would rot away my brain may actually help the brains of those suffering from ADHD.

The idea isn’t totally out of the blue. The University of Helsinki is well known for its neuroscience, with researchers already investigating how brain activity changes when people do different things. Scientists there have already tinkered around with game play, checking out local Helsinki production Angry Birds to test why the game was so addictive, and it's all part of a push by Finnish developers to build games that do good.

But using games to change people’s brains for health reasons is an ambitious and relatively new concept. Still, Helsinki has the scientists and the gaming companies—Angry Birds developer Rovio is just one—to give the idea a proper look. Now, researchers also have cash: Tapio's company Mental Capital Care received 790,000 euro in funding from Finnish investment board Tekes last year to test out a game designed to cure the symptoms of ADHD.

Using some fairly simple games, such as what appears to be an Asteroids clone called AstroComet, along with some head wear technology designed to study neuroplasticity, a regimen of these games is being used to alter brain function in a way that alleviates the symptoms of ADHD. It's a tantalizing thought, given the now common perception of too many children being on too many drugs these days. If doctors could replace a regimen of mind-altering drugs, which children often hate taking, with a regimen of mind-training targeted video games that are fun enough that kids want to play them, it might end up being as or more effective with a higher adoption rate by the patient.

And, lest you think this is some kind of attempt to cram cookie-cutter games into the treatment plans for everyone, the games are highly tuned for each individual. They have their brainwaves studied over the course of their natural routine via a headset called the Emotiv, an EEG cap that functions like a mobile MRI, and then the researchers study the EEG output to tailor the game to each patient.

“We start the gaming treatment by analyzing the person’s brains, and defining the areas of the brain which are too active or not active enough,” said Tapio. “And then we create a gaming plan that will stimulate those areas of the brain.” The game is tuned to make the tasks accomplishable by thinking in a certain way—a desirable way, from the doctor's point of view. But it’s more than just concentrating.

“It’s not only the activity in brain areas we are trying to affect but also the kind of activity: the different wavelengths, the different types of electromagnetic action—it can’t be too high or too low. We set a goal which will be optimal for the patient,” [research director Ville] Tapio said. “And after we have created an optimal profile for the patient, he will start the gaming and get his brain active to the optimal levels.”

So sorry, kids, but we're still a ways away from being able to tell parents, girlfriends, or boyfriends that Grand Theft Auto is actually helping our brains to function better, but it's important to remember that for all the evils some claim digital games are responsible for, they aren't the evil panacea older generations occasionally claim. They can do good as well.

from the 'stop-pointing-out-our-failures!' dept

Government entities are irony-proof, especially those most humorless of government entities -- the censors. Case in point: the Finnish Supreme Administrative Court has decided that the Finnish police did nothing wrong when it added an anti-censorship site to its blacklist.

Getting from point A to point Z is mildly tangled and somewhat humorous, especially from a distance (i.e. not being the site's owner). Here's what happened. In 2006, the Finnish government enacted legislation that added sites distributing child pornography to a national block list. All well and good, except that, as most censorship efforts do, it also blocked some sites not distributing child porn.

As the process of blocking the sites is done in secret and the list of blocked sites has never been officially made public, an individual, Matti Nikki, decided to create a site called lapsiporno.info (translates as child porn dot info) criticizing the secretive process and the fact that there's no way to make an official complaint about one's site being listed on such block list. He also hosted on his site a list of sites known to be on the list, but didn't contain any child porn material whatsoever.

So, as government agencies do, it assumed a site with "child porn" in the name hosted child porn. It also looked at the URLs contained on Nikki's site, compared them with its own list, and decided he was linking to child porn. Bang. Onto the list he went.

Nikki sued the NBI (National Bureau of Investigation) for including his non-child-porn-hosting site on its block list. The first decision went his way, but not because he wasn't hosting illegal content.

[T]he Administrative Court of Helsinki ruled that inclusion of his site was illegal on the grounds that the block list was meant to block only sites hosted outside Finland (whereas Nikki's site was hosted and maintained in Finland).

But the higher court stepped in and overruled that decision, using an amazing amount of terrible logic.

The court found that as Nikki listed the links to the sites that are known to be included in the censorship list, his site was aiding people to find them. It found that even the fact that Nikki's site contained material that was clearly legal (articles criticizing the censorship legislation), the interests of the children must come before freedom of speech. It also stated that if it were to rule Nikki's site legal on the grounds that it hosts legal material, other child porn sites could also circumvent the legislation by adding non-child porn material to their sites.

That's how that works out. No one bothered to verify whether all the sites on NBI's list contained child porn -- it was just assumed they did and that Nikki's linking was illegal. Why? The second sentence explains it all.

"...the interests of children must come before freedom of speech…"

A completely legal site, one that pointed out errors in the NBI's block list, was shut down for the children. Nice. And then the court went even further claiming that if it ruled in favor of Nikki, existing child porn sites could attempt to be taken off the block list simply by adding legal content. If that's the case, the block list is a complete sham. Either a site hosts child porn or it doesn't. If a site hosts child porn but adds an unrelated blog, it still hosts child porn. If that's the standard for the block list, enforce it.

A site that doesn't host child porn, but points to other sites being wrongfully censored, STILL DOESN'T HOST CHILD PORN. Enforce the rule. Don't contort the rule just to shut down a site that criticizes NBI's overblocking and then claim the censorship effort is in the "interest of children."

If you're against sloppy filtering efforts, you're for abusing kids. That's the message this sends.

from the raising-visibility dept

The Pirate Party of Sweden famously got two MEPs elected to the European Parliament in its last election, and now in an interesting move, Peter Sunde -- probably best known as the former spokesperson for The Pirate Bay -- has announced that he'll be running for the European Parliament in Finland (he was apparently born in Sweden but his ancestry is Finnish). After the Pirate Bay -- which many people incorrectly assume is connected to The Pirate Party -- Sunde went on to found Flattr, a system (which we use here) that helps content creators make money.

I've discovered that people who have never met Peter tend to be very quick to jump to conclusions about him -- almost always entirely incorrect. Amusingly, when I first met him, a few years back in Berlin, he and I were sitting in "the green room" of a conference right before a panel that he was supposed to be on. All of the other panelists on his panel had entered the room and were discussing the panel across the room, without knowing that Peter was sitting right there talking to me. So they started talking about him, and someone explained that "the pirates now hate Peter, because he switched to the other side with Flattr." Of course, nothing is further from the truth. This was never about "sides" but about reality. Peter has always been incredibly focused on recognizing what reality is and trying to respond to reality -- rather than making up artificial boundaries and pretending a fake world must exist where it does not. I'm not sure how well that will play in actual political situations, but it would be great to see what would happen.

The one bit that surprises me, frankly, about the decision to do this via the Pirate Party is that, in the past, Peter has actually distanced himself from The Pirate Party in the past, saying that he preferred other parties, such as the Swedish Green Party. Either way, in my limited experience with him, Peter has always been one of the most perceptive and thoughtful commenters on the state of technology and its impact on society and culture. I've come away from our conversations feeling like I understood a lot more about the world than when the talks started. I recognize that for many who come with pre-conceived notions, it will be easy to try to dismiss him, but for those willing to take a chance and see what he actually has to say, there is tremendous value in hearing what he has to say -- and in a political world, it would be great to see what he could accomplish.

That said, there is the outstanding matter of the ruling against him -- and the fact that he's been sentenced to jail, though it's still never been made clear when or how he will be expected to serve that sentence. I would imagine that somehow, that issue would need to be clarified if his candidacy actually gets any real momentum.

from the above-the-law dept

Once again, it appears that folks in the MPAA seem to believe that they are completely above the law. In an interesting revelation in a big copyright case in Finland it came out during the trial that important evidence was tampered with, and when asked about it, IFPI officials who were in the courtroom said that it was an MPAA exec who was in the room with them when it happened, though they declined to name the exec.

The case involved some servers in Finland that were apparently used by a warez group there called Angel Falls. The tampered evidence came out when an expert investigator was on the stand, and showed some video of his investigation. However, the defense pointed out that the username in the video did not match up with the relevant entry in the logfile, at which point it was revealed that the MPAA exec had tampered with the evidence in an attempt to cover the tracks of the "user" who was a part of the investigation. According to TorrentFreak's summary of the events:

The video, a screencast of the investigation, showed a particular username accessing an Angel Falls FTP server. However, the corresponding text log for the same event showed a completely different username.

“When the IFPI investigator was asked about this he acknowledged that the names did not match. He said that the Finnish anti-piracy people and IFPI had collected the information together, but there was also an MPAA executive in the room while the evidence gathering took place,” Hietanen explains.

The IFPI investigator was then asked to reveal the name of the MPAA executive. He declined, but did offer an explanation for the inconsistencies in the evidence.

In an apparent attempt to hide the identity of one of their spies, the MPAA executive edited the evidence gathered during the session.

“The IFPI investigator handed over the evidence material to the MPAA senior executive who then changed the text file before the anti-piracy organization handed over the evidence to the Finnish police,” Hietanen says.

Incredibly, the MPAA exec had not told the defense of this change, which is why it came out in court when they spotted it. This has resulted in the police starting an investigation into possible evidence tampering (they found 10 changes to the files), as well as the overall case ending in a less spectacular fashion than the MPAA and IFPI had clearly hoped. Two of the defendants were acquitted entirely, while the other four were given suspended sentences. The plaintiffs' request for 6 million euros also was knocked all the way down to merely 45,000 euros.

Still, the really incredible thing here are the actions of the MPAA and their continued apparent belief that they are entirely above the law, so long as they're pursuing someone they feel is involved in copyright infringement. It calls into question the "evidence" presented in other cases as well.